


In My Dreams We're Almost Touching

by NightStarlings



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Consensual Underage Sex, First Time, M/M, Masturbation, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-12
Updated: 2017-04-12
Packaged: 2018-10-18 03:17:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10608183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightStarlings/pseuds/NightStarlings
Summary: “Jesus fucking Christ, Sammy,” Dean says, and if he’d sounded wounded before, then now he sounds broken. “I can’t. I’m not – no. I can’t touch you Sammy, I can’t.”Sam is thirteen, and Dean is his whole world, but there are rules.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Sam is thirteen, Dean is seventeen. Since everything is going to be awful later, only seems fair that it's not entirely awful for them now.

Sam is thirteen, and Dean is his whole world.

They’ve been at school nearly a whole semester, now, and Dean says they’re going back next semester, too. Sam doesn’t know why, but he’s giddy with it, all this time spent in one place. Maybe it’s because Dean’s playing ball, or maybe it’s because dad finally got sick of Sam’s unholy temper-tantrums whenever they upped sticks and moved somewhere new, but Sam doesn’t care why. He just cares that it  _ is. _

Dean drives them to school when dad isn’t here, and increasingly that feels like most of the time. He leaves them the numbers and all the same instructions as always, repeated back by rote, and he takes off for two, three weeks at a time on a hunt halfway across the country.

(Sam worries, though he doesn’t like to admit it out loud. When dad hasn’t called for a while, those are the nights he slips into Dean’s bed, even though Dean grumbles that he’s too old for this, now, even though it’s nearing summer and it’s hot with two of them under the sheets. Dean never actually kicks him out.)

This, though, is his favourite time of day. Sat in the car with Dean, windows rolled down and singing along to whatever tape Dean’s shoved in the deck, after school, and half the time Dean’s straight from practice without bothering to shower, first. 

Only today, he showered in the locker room and –

“ – I’ll drop you home, there’s pizza in the fridge from yesterday.”  
  
“What do you mean, drop me home?” Sam’s already appalled, the urge to kneel up on the seat and sing fading fast, ruined by Dean’s words. “You’re not coming too?”

“Nah, I’ve got this thing,” Dean says, evasive. “With the team.”

Sam scowls, turns his head towards the window where warm, sun-drenched houses flash by, their white faces almost too-bright against his narrowed gaze. It’s not that Sam doesn’t want Dean to hang out with his friends, or whatever. It’s just that he’d gotten used to this, to their routine, to Sam finishing off his homework while Dean showered and then just hanging out, heady with the heat of summer and the rattle of the crappy AC and the clink-fizz of the ice melting in their coke.

“Don’t be like that, Sammy,” Dean says, with a laugh, and he reaches out to ruffle Sam’s hair. Sam does his best to push Dean’s arm away, but he’s scrawny and Dean’s not, and in the end he only manages to escape by pushing himself into the corner of the seat, right up against the door where the wind whips at the hair that’s growing long into his eyes. “It’s just one night. We can watch that movie tomorrow. It’ll still be there.”

It’ll be there as long as they want it, because Dean stole it from the video store, slapped it down on the table with a grin and a wink and  _ look what I found! _ , and it’s wrong to steal but Dean had stolen it for  _ him, _ because Sam had been going on about this movie for months now. All his friends had seen it, and they loved it, and no he couldn’t go and watch it at their house, Dean, because they didn’t know he was too much of a freak to have missed it the first time ‘round.

“Whatever,” he says, churlish. “I hope your coach chokes on his milkshake.”

Dean only laughs.

Sam watches the impala pull away again from the window, backpack still hanging from one shoulder and frown pasted across his face. He slings his bag down with a sigh and hits the AC unit, right in that sweet spot on the side that seems to stop the coughing, rattling noise for half an hour or so.

There _is_ pizza in the fridge, but no coke. Sam could go and get some - he’s thirteen years old, he can make it to the store and back without dying, no matter what dad says - but in the end, he can’t be bothered. He drinks sour water from the tap, instead, half the glass filled with ice and spilling condensation over his fingers that he wipes across his hot face, uses to swipe away the sweat at the back of his neck.  
  
He thinks about not eating dinner as an act of mutiny – Dean will notice, for sure, and he’ll be _mad_ – but hunger induces him to one slice, and after that, he realises that he’s _ravenous_. He’s hungry a lot, these days, and it seems like the more he eats the more he grows. He’s going to need new jeans soon, again, and sometimes he has this ache in his bones, like they’re growing too fast. Dad says he’s going to be as tall as Dean, one day, and Sam can’t wait for it. Then there’ll be no stupid advantages between them when they tussle, or when they spar for real.

Pizza polished off and box stuffed in an already over-full trash can, he gives his homework one look before deciding he can’t be bothered. It’s all almost finished, anyway, because practice had been boring, all drills. He’d still watched Dean, for some of it, through his lashes - watched the determination on his sun-reddened face and the power in his limbs as he went from still-start to sprint, outstripping all the other kids.

Dean never cared about school until he started playing baseball.

Moving school to school means Sam’s skipped through a dozen different curricula, some better than others. It also means that at least twice now, he’s had to sit through those awkward classes about _growing up_ – three, if you count that one school where they’d been told briskly that masturbation was a sin and abstinence the cornerstone of a decent life, which Sam doesn’t. He’s read books, too – curious, always curious – though he’d always read them furtive, in the library, hidden inside another book.

God help him if anyone saw him reading them. God help him if  _ Dean _ saw him reading them.

Dean, who ‘teaches’ him stuff sometimes, sleazy anecdotes and waggled eyebrows, and Sam wrinkles his nose and calls his brother  _ gross _ because he doesn’t know what to do with the flip-flop sensation low in his belly.

None of this - not school, not the books, and certainly not Dean - has really helped him with the problem of how he feels when he looks at his big brother, and his freckled nose and the lean curve of bicep and the shallow mountain-valley run of his ribs when he strips his shirt off. Or when Dean ditches him to hang out with the stupid guys on his team.

Sam flops himself onto the bed face-down, with a noise of frustration, and tries to think about something else.  _ Anything _ else. But the heat must be getting to him, because all he can focus on is how he’d woken up this morning in Dean’s bed, and Dean had been pressed hot all up one side of him, like a furnace, skin sticky with sweat between them.

Should have been gross, but instead Sam had been lying there with eyes wide-panicked in the half-dark, trying to work out whether he could slip from bedroom to bathroom without Dean waking up and  _ seeing _ him like this. Dean’s hot breath puffing against his shoulder hadn’t exactly helped.

What if his brother  _ had _ woken up?

He’d have shoved him, probably – _c’mon, Sammy, keep that shit in your own bed_ \-- and rolled out from under the covers and chucked a pillow at him before he disappeared into the bathroom to shower, and Sam would have been _mortified_.

Or, whispers his brain, treacherous. Or maybe he’d have laughed, that low chuckle Sam’s heard when Dean is talking to girls, the one that always makes them lean in closer, and maybe Sam would have felt it across his neck, his ear. A half-shiver valiantly braves the heat to make it partway down his spine at the thought, and he groans a frustrated groan before he bites at the pillow, as if he’s not alone and needs to stifle the noise.

Dean wouldn’t have done that.

But if he had, then maybe he’d have slid a hand onto Sam’s stomach, too, or across the bony jut of teenage hips, and his fingers would have been scorching against Sam’s skin. And maybe he’d have said  _ someone had good dreams, _ or  – no, no, he’d have said  _ what, you don’t know what to do with that, Sammy? _

Sam can’t help the way his hips are shifting against the mattress, now, eyes screwed shut and canine digging sharp into his tongue even as that one logical part of him whispers that Dean wouldn’t, Dean would never, Dean  _ doesn’t _ .  
  
There’s sweat clinging to the small of his back, curling the lock of hair at the nape of his neck. He rolls onto his back and fights his shirt off, flinging it to one side  – just to keep cool, he tells himself, that’s all, and fingers dig into the sheets because he doesn’t know what else do do with them when his thoughts drift back to  _ Dean’s _ hands, smoothing over his skin.

Maybe they’d rest just so. Sam’s own hand flutters hesitantly above his skin before it arranges itself low on his abdomen, fingers just brushing the waistband of his jeans. Maybe he’d drag calloused fingers all the way up sensitive sides -- Sam squirms a little as his own fingers lay the trail  – and maybe… maybe he’d brush a thumb across Sam’s nipple?

Sam’s breath hitches audibly as his own thumb acts as understudy. Yeah,  _ yeah _ , Dean would do that, and again, circling and feeling the way it pebbled under his touch. Sam’s cheeks are burning, but he tips his head back and moans nevertheless, quiet and a little shy.

He pushes down jeans and boxers before he can second-guess, so he’s completely naked on the bed, the feeling of being too vulnerable somehow only adding to the fire in his belly. Dean’s fingers would fit just right in the angle of hip and leg, and Dean would say  _ hey, I got you Sammy, _ and he’d press his lips to the corner of Sam’s jaw as fingers slipped under boxers to wrap around  –

    “– _fuck!_ ”

Sam bucks up, and can’t help Dean’s name drawn long and sweet from his lips. Maybe Dean would laugh at that, too, at Sam’s over-eagerness, but Sam doesn’t care. Teeth worry at his bottom lip, muscles in his abdomen bunching and curling at the drag of fingers against himself. Dean would kiss him, maybe  – Sam knows how to do that, in this fantasy-world, one of those movie-perfect kisses  – or maybe he’d straddle Sam so that his weight was pressed above him, fingers still working and say –

             “  – _ Jesus, _ Sammy!”

Everything comes crashing down, loud and sudden and heart-attack fast, and Sam is scrabbling for the sheets, burrowing himself under them with panic seizing his lungs, breathless for an entirely different reason than he was three seconds ago. He doesn’t know what to do or what to say so he flares up defensive.

“What the hell?” Sam demands, voice almost cracking, and Dean is still  _ staring _ , frozen just inside the doorway. “Close the door, you freak!”

Dean does, glances behind like he’s only just realised it’s open, and kicks it shut with his foot. But then his gaze is back on Sam, and Sam can feel his cheeks glowing bright red like sunburn, and he pulls the sheet up over his head, just to avoid it. Maybe if he stays here forever, he won’t ever have to think about this again.

He curls up on himself, small and ashamed.

“I thought you were at that thing,” he mutters from beneath his flimsy shield, tone accusatory. “With your team.”

“They, uh  – ” Dean clears his throat before he talks again, and it doesn’t sound like he’s even moved. Because he’s horrified, probably, because oh, god, Sam had been thinking about him and his hands and his lips and surely there’s no way that Dean could know that, but what if he  _ does _ ? “They’re boring as hell. Blew them off, thought we could watch that movie, or…”

Dean trails off and Sam doesn’t respond. He just stares at the off-white sheet, and waits to be swallowed up forever, or at least for Dean to take off again.

Dean, the bitch, does not take off again.

“Hey, Sammy. C’mon. It’s no big deal.”

“Go away.”

“I mean, sure, you could have used the shower  – ”

“You weren’t supposed to be here!”

Sam’s verging on hysterical. This is it, he thinks, the end of  _ everything _ . Dean will forever more look at him and think of this moment, and everything is going to be weird. He’s sure as hell not going to let Sam into his bed anymore, not going to sprawl up against him on the couch or ditch his team just to come back and hang out.

   (Something guilty curls in Sam’s stomach. That’s his own fault, ruining that.)

A sigh from Dean, and Sam feels the mattress shift. Alarm pierces through his self-pity as he realises that Dean is sitting on the bed, and god, there must be something wrong with him because even after all this, his brain fixates on  _ Dean _ being here, being close enough to touch, and suggests his body take a cautious interest again.

Sam fights that suggestion for all he’s worth.   


“Sammy, look  – ah, hell, which one of these lumps is your arm  – ”  
  
Sam sticks one out from under the sheet, straight up towards the headboard, and Dean snorts a laugh before patting it, sort of awkwardly. His hands are hot, and rough, and jesusfuck, yeah,  there’s definitely something wrong with Sam.

“It’s life, man. We all do it.” Dean’s trying to make him feel better, because he always does  – because dad tells him  _ look after Sammy, _ and Dean always does what dad tells him  – but it’s not working. Sam remains sullen and silent, and withdraws his arm under the sheet again. “I mean  – I do it a lot too, y’know.”

Sam tries not to be interested. But his voice is just a little strained when he says:

  “...yeah?”

“Sure,” Dean says. “What, you think I’m taking so long in the shower ‘cause I like to look pretty?”

“Yes,” Sam answers on auto-pilot. “You’re vain. Probably get trapped in your own reflection.”

Dean laughs, and against all odds, Sam does feel a little better.

“Bitch,” Dean says, mock-offended, but Sam can tell he doesn’t mean it. He consents to pull the sheet down, to expose the top half of his face as he hands back  _ jerk _ , and watches Dean’s smile quirk a little wider.

Dean’s flushed, too, or maybe he’s caught the sun. He reaches over and tugs the sheet down a little more, until Sam’s lobster-bright face is free from the humid confines of his self-made shelter.

“There you are,” Dean says. “Quit worrying about shit so much, Sam. Just - give a guy some warning.” And he reaches out and slaps an unthinking hand down on Sam’s middle, right where Sam had laid his own, earlier, and thought about Dean.

Sam hates himself for the noise that leaves his mouth.

Just as he was deciding that maybe this wasn’t as apocalyptic as he’d first thought, that maybe it would all be fine in a week or two once he’d finished obsessing about it, he goes and does that. An intake of breath like a whimper, unbidden, eyes falling shut and then anchoring themselves there because god, he doesn’t want to see the way Dean looks at him, after that.

Dean’s hand stays where it is for the longest time, and even through the sheet, Sam can feel its heat.

  “Sammy,” Dean says, and he sounds  _ wounded _ , like that time dad had come through the door with Dean’s arm slung around his shoulder, taking nearly all of Dean’s weight and there’d been blood soaking through one side of Dean’s shirt. Dean had looked at him wide-eyed and terrified on the bed, and tried for a smile and said  _ hey Sammy, it’s okay _ , but sounded just as bad as he’d looked. He sounds like that now, like something’s ripped a chunk from him, and Sam knows that it’s him, that he did that.

He opens his eyes.

Dean’s staring at him, jaw tight and pupils blown so wide that for a second Sam is scared of what’s wearing his brother’s face. Sam grits his teeth and tips his chin, a little defiant, and waits for Dean to haul back and hit him, or hotfoot it out the door. This is all Sam’s fault and so Sam’s going to watch it happen, because he deserves it, because –

      – Dean’s hand moves. Just fractionally, fingers curling and shifting like he doesn’t even realise that he’s doing it, but Sam’s tense as all hell from all that built-up suspense in his muscles, from the adrenaline and the shame and the fear. He can’t help it. He pushes up into the touch, breathes Dean’s name and tries to make it annoyed but fails, he fails so bad and it sounds the way it did when he’d been alone and imagining, trailing from his lips like a benediction.

He hears Dean’s dry swallow.

“What were you thinking about?” Dean asks, and his voice is lower than it should be, rougher. Sam thinks again about whether the salt lines were unbroken when he closed the door, whether the  _ real _ Dean is out with his team and what fantasy-Dean might actually  _ be _ , but lips part to answer anyway.

It’s ruined, it’s all ruined, so he says “I was thinking about being in bed with you.”

Dean makes this rumbling noise somewhere in his chest as his eyes flutter closed and his hand shifts again like it’s not sure whether to withdraw or to settle itself more firmly. Sam makes the decision for him by sitting. Dean’s hand falls away, like it’s been burned, and his swallow seems to stick in his throat when the sheet pools to Sam’s waist, and makes obvious what he’s been trying so hard to hide.

“Dean,” he says, and hits a wall, uncertain. “I was thinking… I was thinking about your hands on me, and  – ”

“ – _ Sammy, _ ” Dean says, and his tone is warning but Sam barrels on past it, too committed now to this downward tumble from the knife-edge he’s been walking.

“ – and how you’d kiss me and – ”

“ – stop, Sam.”

That’s what does it. Sam, not Sammy. He flushes, cheeks reddening even further, if possible, and swallows hard as he looks away from Dean. Dean heaves a trembling breath and scrubs his hands across his face, clears his throat.

“You can’t say stuff like that, Sam. You  – you just  _ can’t _ ,” Dean says, lamely, and he doesn’t sound  _ mad _ but Something curls tight inside of Sam, anyway, when Dean stands up. “Look, I’ll just – I’ll just leave you to uh, take care of… yourself.”

“ _ You’re _ supposed to care of me,” Sam says, and then he’s scrambling in the tangle of sheets, pushing himself up onto his knees, naked and somehow unashamed, too lost in all the ways he’s fucked up in the last twenty minutes to be able to find it. 

The mattress bows, cheap thing not sturdy enough to take his weight at the edge of it, and he over-balances – flails –

                                    – Dean catches him, all instinct, one arm looped around his waist and one splayed wide against his stomach to steady him, and Dean looks stricken and Sam feels like his heart is going hammer out of his mouth but he presses a clumsy kiss against the corner of Dean’s lips, anyway.

He’s not good at this, like in his imaginings. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands and he winds up just clutching at Dean’s t-shirt, big handfuls of it gathered between his fingers as he murmurs  _ Dean _ and  _ please _ against his brother’s lips.

 “I need your help,” he says, and then hates how that sounds – like he doesn’t know how to do this by himself, like he’s useless – but Dean’s explosive exhale makes him hopeful that maybe it was close to right, maybe it was enough.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Sammy,” Dean says, and if he’d sounded wounded before, then now he sounds  _ broken. _ “I can’t. I’m not –  _ no. _ I can’t touch you Sammy, I  _ can’t _ .”

Sam whines. His head falls, forehead pressing against Dean’s shoulder and breath shuddering through his lungs, fingers curling and uncurling in Dean’s shirt, and all he wants, all he  _ needs _ is for Dean to touch him. He knows that he shouldn’t. But he does. His next trembling breath tastes like the onset of tears, tight at the back of his throat, and Dean seems to realise in that omniscient sort of way he has.

“Hey, hey,” he says, soft and gently. “C’mon, Sammy, don’t –”

Dean relents. Sort of. He pushes Sam back onto the bed and he climbs on, too, settles himself against the headboard and then beckons Sam over. Sam, chewing uncertain on his lip, follows, and lets Dean turn him with careful hands against his sides, pull Sam’s back flush against his chest.

“I can’t touch you, Sammy,” Dean says, again, like he’s trying to convince himself with it, but his hands run up the ladder of Sam’s skinny ribs and his chin rests itself on Sam’s shoulder. “I shouldn’t. That’s…”

Dean trails off with a harsh breath, hot against Sam’s neck, and Sam’s right back to square one, right back to what he’d been imagining so intently when he’d started this whole mess. His fingers twitch, desperate to touch, to find some relief.

“Go ahead, Sammy,” Dean tells him, the same encouraging voice as when he’s teaching him something, when he thinks Sam’s doing good. Sam hesitates, just for a second, and then he wraps his fingers around himself, head falling back against Dean’s shoulder and spine arching out at the touch. Dean’s hands stay rooted to Sam’s sides, thumbs brushing burning circles against him, and his breath stays playing hot against Sam’s already heated skin.

He’s already got something tight building low in his abdomen, and he repeats Dean’s name to himself, chanting that single syllable over and over, pleading. When he forces his eyes open and rolls his head, he sees Dean with dark eyes and parted lips, gaze fixed on his own face like he’s awestruck.

“That’s it,” he says, low, and Sam can feel the murmur of the words through the hollow parts of his torso. “Just like that, Sammy.”

Dean’s hand moves, skates up Sam’s side, and when thumb brushes against nipple Sam makes a strangled noise, hips bucking, and Dean groans low in his throat and there’s only the briefest hesitation before he does it again, and Sam is shuddering through his release with Dean’s lips making the shape of his name against his neck.

It’s not until he’s boneless and breathless against Dean’s chest, Dean still holding him tight, that Sam shifts and realises that Dean is hard against his back. He looks at Dean, eyes wide and bright and worried now that he’s painted all this heady tension across his own stomach, and  _ god _ , one of Dean’s hands.

Dean kisses his nose, something so unexpected that Sam only blinks.

“Shift, kid,” Dean says. “I need a shower.”

And Sam wants to say  _ no, stay, you didn’t say that I couldn’t touch you _ , but his mouth is just as slow and stupid as his brain, right now, and instead he lets Dean manhandle him forward and slip out from behind him, chuck his own t-shirt at him to clean up his mess.  
  
And then something in Dean’s expression softens and he looks at Sam, laid out on the rumpled bed, all pink skin and long limbs he hasn’t grown into and sweat-damp hair, and he says  _ god, you’re beautiful _ , and then takes a second to look embarrassed about it before he’s in the bathroom, door definitely shut behind him.

Sam wipes himself clean-ish and abandons the t-shirt back where it came from, and listens to the hacking sound of the AC, and tries to remember what the world is supposed to feel like – the world before  _ this _ .

    He can’t. What’s more, he doesn’t much care.


End file.
